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High-tech answers to reduce collisions

The team

Smart car
technology has emerged as new way to help reduce the number of car accidents.
The Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system developed by a group of French
scientists is at the forefront of this new technology. Their ACC uses radar to
help prevent collisions and enhance driver comfort.

Video portrait

Car accidents remain one of the leading causes
of death and injury. Last year, car collisions in the European Union resulted
in 35 000 deaths and 1.2 million injuries. The crashes also cost hundreds of
billions of euros. Although technological advances like airbags have helped
lessen the severity of accidents, there has been minimal progress in reducing
the number of collisions.

Since 90-95% of automobile accidents derive
from human error, companies have been developing driver assist technologies.
These smart car technologies are currently mainly available on trucks and
high-end car models.

In the early 1990's, a Thales Systèmes
Aéroportés team based in Brest facility (France) developed a series of
inventions that led to the creation of a new, cost-effective car radar system.
This innovation, based on Thales' expertise in the field of radars and signal
processing, was also the result of the Group's close relationship with its
academic partners and local SMEs. The
patents' licence was applied in a product developed by Autocruise, a joint
venture between Thales and TRW, based in Brest
and now fully-owned by TRW.

These inventions also led to the production of
the first automobile radar based on millimetre wave MMICs (monolithic microwave
integrated circuits) solutions, a technological breakthrough at the time.

The radar sensor based on these inventions
measures the distance and relative speed of objects in front of a vehicle. It
then automatically slows down or speeds up the car to a preset speed to
maintain a safe distance to the preceding vehicles in the lane.

Unlike many similar systems on the market, the
solution resulting from the inventions implements a frequency-shift keying
continuous-wave (FSK-CW) to simultaneously determine the car's distance from
foreign objects and gauge their speeds. Thanks to the patents, this waveform
provides very accurate distance and speed measurements as well as a high level
of objects' discrimination. It enables a reduction of the number of antenna channels,
thereby cutting down on the complexity of the electronics which results in a
smaller, less expensive and easy to integrate radar sensor.

The low cost design of the sensor makes it
accessible to more car owners. It is also smaller than competing technologies
and is well suited for road situations where multiple vehicles need to be
tracked.

By innovating in the car-radar field, Thales
has used its intellectual property beyond its core business and has shown its
willingness to forge partnerships in the academic and SME environment.